A Wicked Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

family was burying their grandfather six plots down from two-year-old Enrique Garcia's grave. Hannah arrived ten minutes late and parked by the chapel. The memorial park was a ten-acre emerald patch in the middle of an industrial compound adjacent to a ticky-tacky apartment complex that had sprung up around it. It was an old-fashioned cemetery with headstones that rose from the ground, instead of being flush mounted in that style the penny-pinching owners of such places prefer for easy mowing. A gentle breeze blew through the rows of granite markers. Crows called from the phone lines strung from the road to the apartments abutting the west side of the patch of green.
    By the time Hannah joined the others gathered around the backhoe, Joanne Garcia had arrived. She bolted from her VW bug and ran toward the group of police officers, lawyers, and cemetery personnel. She didn't even take the keys from the ignition or shut the car door.
    "You'll rot in hell for this," she yelled at a cop blocking her from the grave site. Her veins popped as expletives convulsed into tears.
    "Why would she want to be here?" muttered Ripperton. "Why would any mother want to see her kid after he'd been planted for a couple of years?"
    "Ripp, you've got to be kidding. Haven't you done this job long enough to know?" Hannah shot him a chilly look. "Because she's his mother."
    Ripperton said nothing more. He smoked and kept his hand on his pager, as if holding it would make someone call and he could leave. There were a lot of things that could be said about Ted Ripperton. Strong-stomached, however, was not among them.
    A yellow backhoe gently scooted a headstone affixed with Enrique Garcia's name and a faded photograph of a sweet, but somewhat sullen, little boy. Hannah stood close to the wound in the lawn as the wheelbarrow-sized claw peeled off the sod. A few feet down, the big machine backed away, and a couple of cops felt the top of the cement liner with their shovels. A half hour later, the tiny casket was chained and strapped in preparation for its removal from the hole.
    "I want video," Hannah said, "every step of the way." An officer with an overly eager-to-please manner framed the scene with the camera lens as he ambled closer to the slash of soil.
    "As long as I have juice in the battery, you'll have your video," he said.
    The casket had been flocked with a pattern of daisies, but groundwater or runoff from the sprinklers had weakened the glue. Sheets of fabric hung like a little curtain around the grimy edges. The box dripped fluid as it hung in the air for ten minutes. The county arranged for a hearse to take Enrique Garcia's remains to the coroner's office in Santa Louisa, but it never showed. In- stead, after scrambling about, a cemetery pickup truck was loaded with the box holding the boy's body. Hannah nodded to Ripp and walked to her car. A police escort blared sirens and flashed blue lights, and two hours after they arrived at the cemetery, they were gone.
    Joanne Garcia yelled from the other side of the parking lot as Hannah got into her car. Her blue eyes flashed hatred and her mouth spewed vulgarities that had been absent from her exceedingly coarse vocabulary when they met at her mobile home. Joanne also looked older; her blond hair seemed white, almost gray.
    "You have no fuckin' right to do this!" Joanne yelled. "You have no idea what you are doing!"
    Hannah felt a jolt of adrenaline and looked over at the red-faced woman with the battered daughter in foster care and the dead son just plucked from the earth like a turnip.
    "We have every right to do so. The judge's order says so. You're making this more difficult than it has to be-- and it's damn difficult."
    "How would you like to have your baby pulled from his rest with God? You don't know how this feels!"
    Hannah shook her head. "But I do," she said quietly, more to herself than to Joanne as she clicked the shoulder harness of her seat belt. In a few moments, she turned to look,